There had been something odd about the doll, whether Don wanted to admit to it or not; Gai was absolutely sure he'd wedged the door closed tightly enough that it wouldn't fall out on its own. He'd felt, at the time, that it was a little bit paranoid, but now he was beginning to wonder if he hadn't been paranoid enough. He didn't want to press the subject with Don, though, as the other man was clearly on edge from the last couple of weeks. The few moments they'd sat quietly was the first time Gai had seen him relax since the Zangyack homeworld.
Eventually, though, they had to get going again, and Gai assiduously packed all of their waste into the outside pockets of his pack. Even if the ship was derelict, he wasn't going to leave trash in it. That just seemed impolite.
It was, therefore, with a definite sense of betrayal that when Gai unzipped his pack to pull out another bottle of water that he saw the huge creepy eyes of the doll staring up at him. It startled him badly enough to jump backwards, and he hit the wall hard.
"What?" Don was on his feet immediately, looking around for what it was that had startled Gai, flashlight in hand like a weapon.
"Why is this in my bag?" Gai asked, pointing.
"Why is what in your bag?" Don's pose loosened, now that there was apparently no threat, and he put down the flashlight.
"That!" Gai pointed dramatically. He hadn't put the doll in his bag, which meant that the only reasonable assumption to make was Don trying to play a prank on him.
"What?" Don said again, and this time came to look over his shoulder. He pulled the doll out, turning it over in his hands. "Why did you take this with you? I thought you didn't like it."
"Take it –" Gai sputtered. "I didn't take it. I left it there."
"Then how did it get in your bag?" Don asked, and it was his reasonable, concerned, and puzzled tone that ignited a spark of anger.
"I clearly didn't put it there," Gai said. "Why did you?"
"Why did I what?" Don asked, without breaking stride in the slightest. He was committed to the prank, Gai could acknowledge that.
"Why did you put the doll in my pack," Gai said, gritting his teeth and trying to maintain some sort of façade of being reasonable.
"I didn't!" Don protested, looking innocent and wounded and still not letting go of the charade.
"What, so it climbed in there by itself?" Gai snatched the doll from Don's hand and slammed it down on the table. It bent at the waist, head tilting back with the impact so that it looked like it was still staring at Gai. He flipped it over, face down.
"I don't – I didn't put it in your bag," Don said, but he was looking less hurt and more pissed off by the second. "That's mean, Gai."
"Mean?" Gai gaped at him.
"To make a big deal out of the doll being creepy, hide it in your bag, and then accuse me of putting it there." Don folded his arms, looking like a cross between a sulking child and an angry adult.
Gai stared, mouth open. He had absolutely no response to that, but if Don was going to take the charade this far, he didn't have to talk to him. He snapped his mouth shut, zipped his bag closed more forcefully than it probably required, and snatched the flashlight off the table before stalking off down the hallway. All of that talk about wanting to create a more positive atmosphere, trying to get everyone to get along better, wanting to be cuddled, and then somehow Don thought this was a funny prank.
Gai wasn't having it.
He hadn't gotten more than a few meters down the hall before Don came running after him, still caught between puzzled and pissed off. It looked like the angry part was winning, though; he stopped jogging when he got close to Gai, and started walking down the other side of the hallway.
Oh, yeah, real mature, Gai thought resentfully. He was the youngest one on the crew, the newcomer, the one that everyone said was a baby, but Don was the one acting like a kid. Well, Gai wasn't going to call him out on it. If Don wanted to stand over there and sulk, Gai was going to let him. The standoff lasted another three and a half decks, Gai checking doors on one side of the hallway and Don checking doors on the other, before Don broached the cold silence.
"Gai," he started.
"What," Gai said, in no mood to be civil.
"I really didn't put the doll in your bag," he said.
Gai stopped walking, trying very hard not to scream. "I didn't put the doll in my bag," he said. "So unless you're telling me that the doll is alive, then we have a problem."
Don glared at him mutely, frustration oozing off of him in waves. He was a better actor than Gai had given him credit for, that was for sure, although Gai was suddenly reminded of a magazine story about Don being a great hero on his homeworld and a brief story about amnesia. Don had been a pretty good actor – liar, Gai's mind supplied – then, too. Gai wasn't going to fall for it.
"If that's the way you want to be about it, fine," Don said.
"Fine." Gai kept walking, skipping the next three or four doors. Don kicked at one of them after Gai went past, and something inside kicked back. Gai froze, his annoyance temporarily forgotten. He and Don exchanged a look, and Don knocked on the door.
"Hello?"
The knocking repeated from the inside, but no voice call came back. Don knocked again, a distinctive pattern this time, and whatever was inside repeated it. A pit started to form in Gai's stomach, and he wished he had the Gokai Spear. He couldn't reach it, though, although he tried. He would rather have explained to Don that he was jumping at shadows than be without a weapon. The flashlight was going to have to do.
Gai knocked once, just in case it was some sort of fluke, and the single knock repeated from inside the room.
"Is anyone in there?" Don called again, and then said something else in no less than three different dialects. Gai assumed he was repeating the phrase, but none of them got an answer.
Gai knocked three times, just to be sure, and this time silence fell. The three knocks were not repeated, and that was somehow worse than the previous mimicry. Gai tried again, three and then two, and jumped backwards as a rapid flurry of pounding came across the door from the inside.
"There's someone in there," he muttered, unable to keep himself from stating the obvious.
"That's what it sounds like," Don said, but he was eying the door critically. "Sometimes something like this would be set up like a trap," he said in explanation, tone still cool. "The Zangyack would rig a room to make noise and then it would either be full of hostile soldiers or it would explode."
"I don't like either one of those options," Gai said. "How do we open the door from farther away?"
The answer was to go down the hallway and throw a rock at the manual release, or at least the equivalent of a rock. Gai pitched a full water bottle with unerring accuracy toward the door, and it slid obediently open and stayed that way.
Nothing exploded. No soldiers came boiling out. Nothing came out, and after a few tense minutes, Gai was ready to scream. "I'm going to go look," he said.
"I don't –" Don started.
"I don't care," Gai snapped, the tension from earlier boiling over again. Don gave him a hurt look, but he stood to follow Gai. He had the Gokai Gun in hand, which just seemed patently unfair; if Gai couldn't call his weapon from the Galleon, why could Don? Unless Don had had it to begin with, in which case Gai felt that Don should have told him that they were not, in fact, unarmed.
The door continued to sit innocently open as they crept toward it, refusing to disgorge anything living or dead or at all reminiscent of an explosion. The water bottle had rolled back toward them, and when they reached it, Don picked it up again and tossed it through the door. Nothing happened with that, either, and that just made the tension ratchet up further.
There was no light in the doorframe that Gai could see, which meant that they were opposite the door before he could actually see inside the room at all. It was no bigger than a closet, empty shelves lining the walls. No few of the shelves had fallen inwards, although whether that had been deliberate or a product of decay, Gai couldn't say. He only saw them as a half-registered background, though, because the object in the center of the floor was taking up all his attention.
The doll was sitting in the center of the floor, staring up at him with its wide unblinking eyes.
"What the hell," Gai hissed, turned on his heel, and started back toward the alcove where they'd left the doll. He didn't care that it was three decks away; this was ridiculous.
"Where are you going?" Don had grabbed his arm and was trying to pull him backwards, but Gai was stronger and determined enough that Don was just dragged along in his wake.
"I'm going to see if the doll is where I left it," Gai said. "Because if it's not there, you're playing a very elaborate prank and I am not amused."
"I didn't take the doll," Don protested, and Gai stopped suddenly enough that Don ran right into him.
"Then how did it get in there?" Don looked either guilty or confused, and at this point Gai couldn't tell the difference. He went back the way they'd come, intending to take the doll out of the closet just so he could be sure, but when he got back to the open door, it was gone. He rounded on Don. "Where is it?"
"I don't know!" Don had let go at this point, and he'd lost all signs of being anything but as pissed off as Gai was. "I didn't touch it! I didn't touch it the first time, and I didn't touch it the second time, and I don't have it now!"
"Then let me see your bag." Gai folded his arms.
Don stared at him, stung. "I can't believe you don't trust me."
"Trust you?" Gai kept his arms folded, because otherwise he was going to do something he regretted. "The – all of you people have been horrible for weeks. We get out here and the first thing you do is tell me some story about wanting to make everything better, and then you stuff a creepy doll in my bag when I'm not looking and deny it!"
"I didn't put the doll in your bag!" Don was almost close to tears, eyes glittering and lower lip just barely starting to tremble. "You – you've been part of the crew for two years! How can you not trust me?"
Gai hesitated, the words catching in his throat. Even if the past few weeks had been a nightmare, it didn't exactly erase everything the crew had been through together. Did it? It shouldn't. But he couldn't let it go, he had to see that Don wasn't taking a joke way too far. "I…" he said, but he'd waited too long.
"If you want to look, then fine," Don spat, one single tear spilling over. He angrily dashed it away and slammed his bag down on the floor. "I'll show you. Look." He yanked the zipper open and upended the bag on the floor. The contents spilled out, blanket roll and water bottle and protein bars cascading over the deck. The doll landed on top of everything, last out of the bottom of the bag. Don made a choking noise, face going pale.
Gai froze, staring at the doll, and then shouldered past Don to look inside the closet. The doll was gone, the closet empty, and it was sitting innocuously on top of the pile of Don's belongings when Gai turned around again. Don reached out, hand shaking slightly, and picked up the doll. His face twisted and he flung it down the corridor. It bounced twice, and then skidded out of sight.
"That's enough, Gai," Don said, wearing an expression Gai had only seen a few times. It was hard to get Don truly angry – he got annoyed or frustrated as much as the next crewmember, but actual anger was something that Gai had almost never see Don display. He was showing it now, face hard and furious. Gai nearly fell back a step before stiffening his legs and reminding himself that this was Don, his crewmate.
Crewmate who you just accused of playing a prank gone too far, his conscience reminded him.
"I don't know what kind of game you're playing, but it's not funny."
"I'm not-" Gai started.
"Accusing me of playing some sick joke on you, and then turning around and doing the same thing is horrible." Don stepped forward, almost aggressively. "It's not nice, Gai."
The uncomfortable thought that Don had not, in fact, been playing a prank could no longer be denied. Gai felt his own rage drain away, replaced by acute shame and apprehension, as the question of who, exactly, had been moving the doll around ran circles though self-recriminations for suspecting Don, of all people, of playing a prank gone too far. "I'm sorry," he blurted out. "I should have known it wasn't you."
Don's eyes narrowed. "You're telling me you didn't put the doll in my –" He paused. "You didn't have time to," he said, some of the anger melting out of his posture. "Neither of us had time to."
"I told you it was creepy," Gai muttered, the words sliding out before he could stop them.
"Right now, I think you might not be wrong." Don gave him a look. "But we're going to talk about you accusing me of playing jokes on you after we figure out what's going on."
"Ah," Gai said. "Yes. Wait." He replayed the events of the last few hours, when and where he'd found the doll and what he and Don had been doing. "You really didn't have time," he said. "You left the room before I did, and then I barricaded the door."
"I told you," Don said, a trace of sulkiness marring his voice. "It wasn't me."
The two of them turned to look down the corridor where Don had thrown the doll, but Gai clearly remembered it rolling around a corner. "Do you want to go looking for it?" he said.
"Not even a little," Don answered, and felt around inside his pack. Apparently satisfied, he stuffed his belongings back into it, and then answered Gai's quizzical look with, "I just wanted to make sure it hadn't crawled back in there."
"I can't believe you just made it more creepy," Gai groused, but the sick feeling of anger and shame was slowly fading.
"I can't believe you thought it was –" Don shook his head. "Let's get this over with, and we'll talk about it back on the Galleon."
"Over with." Gai sighed. "I really don't think there's anything alive here."
As if on cue, a scraping noise came from the corridor where Don had thrown the doll, and Gai found himself slowly turning around for a second time. On any other day, he would have charged forward without hesitation in an attempt to kick whatever it was back to the hole it had crawled out of, but this was not a normal day. It had been a trying day, full of unearned vitriol and creepy hallways and a doll that wouldn't stop staring at him and had been following them around of its own inanimate volition.
There was nothing in the hallway to kick, but just as Gai had decided that the sound was a figment of his own imagination – and the fact that Don was also staring down the hall could be explained as a shared hallucination or Don taking his cue from his teammate, that was Gai's story and he was sticking to it – a click echoed off the walls followed by a dull thud.
"We could go the other way," Don offered.
"Discretion being the better part of valor?" Gai said, having learned that in a high school English course not nearly long enough ago. He'd hated that saying.
"Sometimes running away means victory," Don said, but he was already edging toward the hallway. His Gokai Gun was in his hand, which made Gai feel slightly better, and he looked mournfully at his flashlight. It wasn't even a heavy flashlight; it was lightweight and easy to travel with.
"Stay behind me," he said to Don anyway. Of the two of them, even essentially unarmed, he was the better combatant in close quarters.
Don threw him a look that Gai interpreted to mean as Don having the better weapon meant he should go first, so Gai carefully pushed Don behind him with his free hand. If Don tripped over an uneven part of the floor and made it that much easier for Gai to get ahead of him, that wasn't necessarily Gai's fault. The damp feeling on Gai's palms vanished as he got closer to the corner, his mind settling into the clarity that came with knowing he was about to try to beat something into the ground.
Gai rounded the corner, darting forward before he could see his opponent clearly and aiming for the element of surprise. It would have been a brilliant move, if there had been an opponent in the hallway. It was fully lit and just as empty, no lights flickering and no shadows to hide the total absence of anything hostile. There was a total absence of anything that wasn't bulkheads and deck plates, including the doll that should have rolled no more than a few centimeters out of sight.
"Nope," Gai said, the clamminess returning to his palms with a vengeance. He was absolutely unashamed to admit that he wanted nothing to do with creepy things that vanished when one wasn't looking at them. "We're going the other way now."
"Why?" There was a very slight edge of a tremor in Don's voice as he edged around the corner to see the unoccupied hallway. "Where is it?" he asked, and there was no need to define what it was.
"Nowhere," Gai said. "Mass hallucination. Doesn't exist. We're going that way now." It wasn't the appropriate pirate move, and it wasn't the appropriate Super Sentai move, and he did not care.
"That way sounds good," Don said.
Even knowing the corridor was empty, it was still hard to turn his back on it. Gai could feel his skin crawling, the hair on the back of his neck standing up as though he were being watched. He was hyperaware of the potential for any sound coming from either the hallway behind him or his own pack, if the doll had decided to crawl inside it while he wasn't looking and he didn't care how ridiculous that sounded, even in the privacy of his own head.
"We should check for survivors on the next deck," Don said after a few minutes, suggestion dovetailing very neatly with the appearance of a set of stairs leading nearly vertically upward. It was more of a ladder than a set of stairs, to be fair, with the steps set widely apart and probably difficult for something shorter than half a meter tall to climb.
"I think we're done with this deck," Gai agreed, and went up the ladder. He was tempted to check his pack out of pure paranoia, and pushed the impulse away. He hadn't heard anything. Don hadn't seen anything. He hadn't seen anything. There was a hatch at the top of the ladder and Gai closed it. The hatch also boasted a bolt, although he wasn't sure why, since there was virtually unlimited access to the entire warren of cargo hold corridors through countless half-stairs and catwalks, but he took a vicious satisfaction in slamming the bolt home anyway.
Don was looking around the new deck space, carefully assessing it with an air of competence he rarely displayed openly. He was as capable as the rest of them, although he tended toward flailing around and was more often than not the target of carelessly flung objects, and it was at times like this that Gai was reminded that Don had lived through the same mayhem and carnage as the rest of them.
"Your bounty was too low," he said, and Don glanced over at him, did a double take, and then stared. "What?" Gai's paranoia ratcheted upwards again, and he all but tore off his pack. "Is it on me? Is it on me? What? What?"
"My bounty?" Don said.
Gai, having determined that the doll was not perched on top of his pack, mocking the both of them, attempted to put it down nonchalantly. He didn't think he'd succeeded, but he wasn't going to acknowledge that. "Well, yeah," he said. "Way too low."
Don blinked at him, nonplussed. "Did you get hit on the head when I wasn't looking?" he asked.
"I'm just saying." Gai made an abortive movement toward the zipper of his pack's main compartment, and then deliberately moved his hand away. He wasn't going to give in to paranoia. "You're way better than the Zangyack gave you credit for."
"I'm still upset that you thought I was playing a prank on you," Don said. "Flattery won't get you out of it."
Gai scrubbed his hands through his hair. "That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm just saying."
"Uh." Don blinked at him again, and Gai was almost tempted to wave a hand in front of Don's eyes or ask him if he was having a seizure. "Thank you?" Don said, finally. "I think."
"You're welcome," Gai said, feeling as though he'd lost control of a throwaway remark that wasn't supposed to generate a conversation, and hoping that would lay it to rest.
"Did you check in?" Don asked suddenly.
"Oh, damn." Gai had completely forgotten that they were supposed to send a signal to the Galleon. "How late are we?"
Don was already rapidly pecking away at the Mobilate, sending the verification code. "I think we just barely made it. I could have sworn we were late."
"Maybe – are you even wearing a watch?" Gai was, and according to his watch, they were a solid twelve minutes outside the fifteen minute check-in window.
Don shook his head. "What's yours say?"
"That we're late." Gai tapped it, but it looked like it was working just fine. "Maybe it's broken. Or fast. Or something. Did you get the confirmation message?"
Don held up the Mobilate, so that Gai could read it for himself. "Nothing's wrong. Maybe your watch got accidentally pushed forward or something."
"Or something," Gai said, but he was starting to have suspicions of other things going wrong, as if the doll and its shenanigans hadn't been enough. "I'm beginning to think this is the worst place we've ever been."
"There was the slime," Don offered. "And the eyeballs."
Gai gave him a wounded look. "Why would you remind me about the eyeballs?"
Don gestured around the corridor. "At least it's not as bad as the eyeballs, right?"
"You're tempting fate," Gai groaned. There was absolutely no way anything was going to go right, not after a remark like that. Whatever deity or great power or anything that had any control over their immediate environment was going to laugh its metaphorical head off and then proceed to make their lives a living hell. He did not relay his conclusions to Don, though, not with Don trying not to give him a deeply skeptical look.
"There's no such thing as fate," Don said, serenely.
"Ha," Gai muttered, and looked at his watch again. It seemed to be working perfectly; he'd picked it up the last time they'd swung by earth because no one else on the Galleon seemed to worry about what time it actually was at any given point. He'd picked up several, making the assumption that he was going to break at least a few, but he was still on the first one. "Don," he said.
"Hm?" Don was peering down the corridor, which was lit by precisely three lights flickering at random.
"We should try to get in touch with someone else." He was already aiming for Luka on the GokaiCellular. "This seems weird."
"Did you see something down there?" Don wasn't paying attention to him at all. Gai gave the corridor a cursory glance, but all he saw was the disorienting effect of unsynchronized flashing lights.
"No," he said, listening to the GokaiCellular ring, and ring, and ring. He tried Ahim, just in case Luka had her hands full with something, with the same result. Joe didn't answer either, and it was starting to bother Gai. He tried raising the Galleon, reasoning that Navi at the very least should be able to answer an incoming call – the Galleon had been correctly sending back their check-in pings, in theory. He couldn't raise Navi, either. "Don, no one's answering."
"There's something there," Don said, and took the flashlight.
"Don," Gai said, with more irritation than urgency, but Don was already going down the hall. Gai jogged to catch up.
The flashlight didn't help with the atmosphere, its beam cutting through twilight one moment and all but lost in the overhead lighting the second, but Gai finally saw what he thought Don was talking about. Part of the corridor had collapsed, spilling crates and containers out into the hallway, and something was moving at the base of the pile.
The beam of the flashlight, when Don maneuvered around the final broken bulkhead, illuminated a paper-white face dominated by blank gray eyes and a slowly moving mouth. It was attached to half of a body, a long-dried sticky trail leading back to the wreckage of the wall. Don shone the light across the wreckage, but there were no gaps large enough to see through into the dark beyond.
A scratching noise finally registered in Gai's ears, and he looked down to see the half-figure scrabbling at the deck plates as it if were trying to pull itself closer to them with withered bony fingers. The only word that came to mind at that moment was zombie, and he would later deny that he shrieked at all.
"There's something in there," Don said, heedlessly stepping closer to the half-zombie on the deck, and Gai shoved him away from its reaching hands. "What are you doing?"
"That thing is dead," Gai said. "Look at it."
"It's moving," Don said, and then it seemed to register that not only was there a body on the floor, but that it was half a body and – having apparently dragged itself halfway across the corridor before getting stuck – it was still moving. "What is that?"
"Whatever that is, it's what's in there, and we are not going any closer." Gai shook his head firmly. "I've seen this before."
"You have?" All traces of apprehension dropped away and Don turned to him with curiosity and anticipation. "What is it? Where? On Earth, before you meet us? These are from Earth?"
"What? No." Gai scrubbed his hands through his hair again and guided Don back the way they'd come, keeping a wary eye on the ruins. "Okay, I technically haven't seen this in real life."
"Don't tell me you're going to go on about your movies again," Don said flatly.
"It's clearly a zombie!" Gai said, arms flung out to the side. He pointed at it. "Look! It's dead, it's moving, it was trying to grab us, and there are more in there! We're lucky it collapsed and that we didn't find it intact and open the door – oh, no."
The skeptical expression had returned to Don's face and he wasn't even trying to hide it this time. "Gai," he said. "That's ridiculous. Dead things don't get up again. They stay dead."
"Okay, what if –" Gai started, but Don was already walking back toward the thing on the floor. Gai caught him around the waist and bodily hauled him out of the corridor. Don struggled and flailed, but Gai was the master of flailing and – more importantly – could take Don down one on one nineteen times out of twenty. This was not the one out of twenty; Gai got them both out of the corridor, through an intersection, and several meters down a perpendicular corridor before he let go of Don.
"You're being ridiculous," Don said.
"I don't want to get eaten," Gai said, and flung his hands up at Don's exaggerated eye roll. "Okay, fine, so what if it wasn't actually a zombie, it's still weird."
"Maybe it was a cyborg," Don said.
Gai perked up. "You mean like Barizorg?"
"Well." Don blew out a sigh, looking over his shoulder. The corridor Gai had picked was mostly lit, the only shadows in the deeply-recessed alcoves holding doors to the various storage compartments. "A lot of the Zangyack cyborgs were based on older technology, and when the organic components, uh. Well, if there was enough of a mechanical framework, it would just keep going when the organic components, uh, were no longer viable."
It took Gai a moment to parse the sentence. "Wait." He looked at Don, then down the hallway, and then at Don again. "So. Barizorg. For example. Human brain, right?"
Don spread his hands wide. "More or less. A few other things."
"So if Joe hadn't, uh." Gai skipped over the actual words. "So Barizorg could have kept going without the human parts of him."
"Kind of." Don scrubbed his hands on his pants, as though trying to wipe off dirt that wasn't actually there. "He wouldn't have been as, uh, efficient. The civilizations that developed the technologies eventually gave up on it because the general population tended to object."
"To – what happened to the organic – did it just die and stay there?" Gai clenched his teeth, feeling almost physical nausea roiling in his stomach. "And the Zangyack thought this was a good idea?" He looked behind Don, but the half-thing hadn't crawled after them. "Is that what that was?"
"I was trying to figure out if that's what that was," Don said, somewhat sharply. "But someone literally dragged me away from it."
"I don't know what's worse," Gai said. "If it's a zombie, or if it's a dead cyborg."
"I told you, it's not dead," Don said, and Gai waved a dismissive hand; at this point, it was semantics.
"Undead cyborg, whatever." His eyes widened; he'd nearly forgotten entirely about the thought he'd had earlier. "Don, what if they're somewhere else on the ship."
"That would be a problem," Don said.
"Forget finding survivors from the crew or anything useful in here," Gai said, more because he felt better vocalizing it than because it needed to be said.
"We need to find the others and get out of here," Don agreed. His Mobilate was in his hand before he'd finished speaking.
"I already tried," Gai said. "Luka, Ahim, and Joe. And Navi."
"Marvelous isn't answering either," Don said, stabbing at the Mobilate as if it were at fault. "Okay. I might be able to – or maybe – or what if…" He bit his lip and looked at Gai. "The simplest thing to do would be to go up to where Marvelous was supposed to moor the Galleon, and use its systems to find the others."
"So right outside the bridge," Gai said. "Sounds like a plan to me."
Don nodded, resolute now that they had a course of action. "Then let's get going."
As if on cue, every light in the section cut out, leaving them in pitch black. Gai swallowed what might have been a squeak, biting his tongue and making a grab for Don. Don struggled against his grip for a moment, until Gai said his name.
"Gai?" he returned.
"Yeah," Gai said, feeling down Don's arm until he found his hand. Sudden paranoia that he'd grabbed something else in the dark made him say, "I've got your right hand. Right? That's you?"
The hand in question squeezed tightly. "Yeah," Don said, voice shaky with relief. "That's me."
Gai felt his knees go a little wobbly, too. "Where's the flashlight?" he asked.
"Left pocket."
After a few minutes of rustling, Gai could hear something being dragged along cloth. "Wait," he said.
"Why?" Don's voice was barely higher than a whisper; he'd mimicked Gai's tone at first, and neither of them had raised their voices. Don's question was the most noise either of them had made since the lights had gone out.
"It makes us a target," Gai said. His eyes were beginning to almost adjust to the dark. He thought he could see a dim red glow along where he knew the bulkheads met the deck, but nothing else. Moving as quietly as possible, he guided Doc toward the nearest wall. There was an alcove to his left, if he remembered correctly, but after the fiasco down the other hallway, he was wary of doors.
"Maybe," Doc said, "but we can't fight something we can't see coming."
Either the red light was getting brighter, or Gai's eyes really were adjusting to the dark. He could see the dim shape of the corridor around them now, and they were the only things moving in it. "You can't see?" he asked.
"It's dark," Don hissed. "I'm not good with – I don't see well in dim light."
"What, really?" Given that he hadn't complained once about the lighting on the ship, Gai was impressed.
"Two years and you didn't notice?" Don said, voice still low.
"I thought you just liked to be able to see all the details," Gai said, although if he thought about it, Don was the one who was always turning on the lights. Don was also the only one who hadn't had trouble with the bizarre planet revolving around a double star; the rest of them had had to wear something covering their eyes.
"Well, I can't see, at all." Don sounded sulky on the surface, but Gai could hear the nervous edge below it.
The emergency lighting – at least, he assumed it was emergency lighting – was bright enough now for Gai to make out Don's face. He switched hands, gripping Don's right hand with his left. "Follow me, okay? I can see enough to know where we're going."
Being able to hear what was coming, if anything did, was going to be their second advantage, and the sudden noise Don made scrabbling through his clothing nearly sent Gai's heart into his mouth before he figured out what it was.
"What are you doing?" he asked, once his heart was back in his chest, pounding a staccato beat against his sternum instead of his throat.
"Here," Don said, and Gai felt the unfamiliar outlines of Don's Gokai Gun in his right hand. It wasn't that he'd never fired one, but he was far more comfortable with his spear. On the other hand, he was going to take what he could get.
"Thanks," he whispered back, and started leading them away to the wall. He'd gotten a solid five meters down the hallway before it occurred to him that he had no idea where the bridge was, and then that it didn't matter, as long as they kept going up. He was feeling optimistic, despite the zombies – which he was going to continue to call zombies, no matter what Don thought they were – the dark, and the creepy doll, until he heard a distinct slithering noise coming from directly behind them.